sorry but i just like a bloke who says " I still love Australia, which is why I have done this deal, to have one of my companies in Australia " and " I made a couple of mistakes when I was young, like we all do ".
Don't you ?
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Success story begins in the trenches.
Sarah-Jane Tasker From: The Australian November 19, 2009
FRANK Timis believes his is the true rags-to-riches story: a Romanian immigrant who built his extensive wealth from the West Australian outback, but as in most mining-magnate tales, his rise to the top isn't free of controversy.
Timis is described as many different characters by others - colourful and controversial - but the billionaire labels himself honest and hard-working.
His rise to the top could have been from a fairytale when told from his own words, while others might litter his story with questionable past decisions, but one attribute that is never in doubt is the Romanian's passion.
The 45-year-old is about to embark on his first Australian listing, in a deal with his private company Eastern Petroleum and his mate Tony Sage's International Goldfields. The two have been associates for a long time, having previously worked on deals together, and despite Timis getting a taste for the world of mining in Australia, he has focused his financial attention on London, New York and Toronto markets.
"I still love Australia, which is why I have done this deal, to have one of my companies in Australia," he said.
The mining billionaire arrived in Western Australia as a 16-year-old with only the clothes on his back after fleeing Romania and boarding a ship in Italy.
It is not an unusual story for an uneducated young man to turn to the mines to earn a quid and it was the vibrant Pilbara region where Timis first got a taste of the sector that was set to turn his luck around.
He tried his hand at a few roles, first as a labourer, then a drill assistant, before he got involved in prospecting and started to collect a few mining leases.
"Australia was and is a country of opportunities if you want to work hard," he says from his office in London. "It is a country where you can really exploit your entrepreneurial skills."
Starting out with a small operation in the East Pilbara, by 1990 Timis started to look at opportunities in Eastern Europe and returned to his birth country, Romania, to become involved in a gold project.
"Between my first three companies, I raised out of Perth from mum-and-dad investors about $35 million and I returned back over $400m," he boasts.
Timis is quick to point out his path to success, though if you dig back into his past, it hasn't been a steady rise free of controversy.
The well-travelled businessman is widely known for the controversy surrounding his first major companies, with Gabriel Resources and Regal Petroleum, both pushing Timis's name firmly into the mining spotlight - but not for market or investor praise.
Regal attracted the attention of regulatory authorities in 2005 when Timis, as head of the company, hyped the prospects of an oilfield in Greece, sending its shares soaring. But it turned out the well was dry. Timis no longer has a role in the company, but remains a shareholder. "With Regal, I had a couple of shake-ups and I had to fire the whole board and we also drilled a dry well in Greece," he says.
But it was Gabriel Resources, a company focused on Rosia Montana in Romania, that attracted a heightened level of backlash in his birth country.
He sold out of that company, which Sage was also involved in, because of the negative attention he received from locals about the group's plan to extract gold from the Apuseni Mountains.
Despite being called colourful, controversial and having the industry label some of his finds as failures, Timis does not shy away from the criticism.
"Facts speak for themselves. Not one company under my control has failed or gone bankrupt," he says.
The father of two is also quick to point out he has 20 institutions that have been investing with him over the past 10 years out of London, Toronto and New York.
He is not one to dwell on the past, but is also honest about the fact that he is a man with a past and discloses to the market that he was twice charged for heroin possession, in Australia, when he was in his early 20s.
"I made a couple of mistakes when I was young, like we all do," he says.
"Some of us are exposed to it. When you start to become a public figure and do well globally, naturally they try to dig.
"I have disclosed that issue to every company and exchange, so there is nothing to hide."
He has clearly come a long way since he arrived in Australia and now flies on his own jet between West Africa, New York, Toronto and Kazakhstan, working 15 hours a day.
"I enjoy what I'm doing. Once you have $200m or $300m, how much more can you spend? I have passed that level already," he says.
"I enjoy building them (companies) up to a level until they become very large or operational and then you sell them or appoint a management team to take them forward.
"When I was young and digging trenches in the East Pilbara, I always dreamed to have my own leases and build a little mine but I never thought I would get to building the level of having multi-billion-dollar companies."
If International Goldfields approves the deal with Timis's Eastern Petroleum at a meeting on Tuesday, expect the colourful character to spend some more time in the country that started his vast fortune.
The $152m deal will give Eastern close to an 80 per cent stake in International Goldfields, which will receive a 50 per cent interest in the Alakol Basin licence block in Kazakhstan.
"It is the first listing in Australia and we believe it has the potential to become a multi-billion-dollar company because of the prospects in the oil fields," Timis says.
Timis doesn't intend to slow down any time soon, and says if he had time off, he'd sleep for two days and by the third be desperate to get to work, and with this ambition he is already looking to opportunities and listings on the horizon.
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